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Ingersoll Lectures on Immortality 


IMMORTALITY AND THE New Tueopicy. By 
George A. Gordon. 18096. 

Human ImmortTALITy. Two supposed Objections 
to the Doctrine. By William James. 1897. 
Dionysos AND ImmorTALITY: The Greek Faith 
in Immortality as affected by the rise of Indi- 
vidualism. By Benjamin Ide Wheeler. 1808. 

THE CONCEPTION OF ImmoRTALITY. By: Josiah 
Royce. 1890. 

LirE EvertastinG. By John Fiske. 1900. 

SCIENCE AND ImmorTALITY. By William Osler. 
Ig04. i 

THE Enptess Lire. By Samuel M. Crothers. 
Igo5. 

INDIVIDUALITY AND ImMoRTALITY. By Wilhelm 
Ostwald. 1906. 
Tue Hope oF Immortatity.. By Charles F, 

Dole. 1907. 

BuDDHISM AND IMMORTALITY. By William S, 
Bigelow. 1908. 

Is ImmorTALITY DESIRABLE? By G. Lowes 
Dickinson. 1909. 

EcyptiAN CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY. By 
George A. Reisner. to11. 

INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY IN THE SONNETS 
OF SHAKESPEARE. By George H. Palmer. 
IQI2. 

METEmpPsycHosiIs. By George Foot Moore. tor14. 

PAGAN IDEAS OF IMMORTALITY DURING THE EARLY 
RoMAN Empire. By Clifford Herschel Moore. 
1918. 

Livinc AGAIN. By Charles Reynolds Brown. 1920. 

ImmorTALity AND THEISM. By William Wallace 
Fenn. 10921. 

IMMORTALITY AND THE MODERN MinD, By Kirsopp 
Lake. 10922. 

THE CHRISTIAN FAITH AND ETERNAL LIFE. By 
George E. Horr. 1923. 





THE SENSE 
OF IMMORTALITY 


LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD 
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 


The Ingersoll Lecture, 1924 


THE SENSE 
OF IMMORTALITY 


BY 


PHILIP CABOT 





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CAMBRIDGE 
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS 
1924 


“ae \ a ¥ as pr “ 
SERRA OF I 


COPYRIGHT, 1924 
BY HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS 


PRINTED AT THE HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS 
CAMBRIDGE, MASS., U.S.A. 


Tuts lecture was delivered on the 

lectureship founded at Harvard 

University by Caroline Haskell 

Ingersoll, in memory of her father 

George Goldthwait Ingersoll of the 
| Class of 1815. 





The Sense of Immortality 
The Freedom of the Slave of God 


o stand in this consecrated place, 
before such a distinguished but 
critical audience, and to attempt 
to instruct you about that aspect of the 
life of man at once the most debated, the 
most obscure, and the most vital that I 
can conceive, is to embark upon an enter- 
prise as hopeless as the quest of the Holy 
Grail. Of course, I am doomed to fail. 
But that is the fate of man in most of his 
enterprises, and after all, perhaps it is 
the effort and not the result that St. 
Peter will record. 

Two other considerations have helped 
me to face the ordeal. The first is the 
growing conviction that I am not in a 
worse predicament than my predeces- 
sors. Men are reluctant to admit the 


2 THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 


authority of the expert in this business, 
and they rightly feel that the only con- 
tribution which any man can now make 
must come out of his own experience. 
The scholar may well be handicapped by 
.the very wealth of his learning, for the 
avalanche of volumes which I brought 
down upon my head, when I sought to 
enlighten my ignorance, was massive 
enough to crush the originality out of 
genius. ) 

And then there came to me the thought | 
of the great figures who have stood here 
before, and the inspiration of their spirits 
guided me to a conviction which has 
given me courage. 

‘The fear of the Lord is not always the 
gate of Wisdom, but he who enters is 
freed from other fears, for it is the en- 
trance to faith; and I stand here this day 
sustained by that fear and by that faith. 

We are passing through a time when 
there is so much testifying to the unfaith- 


THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 3 


fulness of men in high places, that it can 
hardly fail to shake our faith in other 
men. But though men may be unfaith- 
ful, it isnot so of God. God is faithful; to 
me that has been proved, and therefore, 
I, though thé humblest of His servants, 
have come to know that there is one 
thing—and one thing only—in which 
I must not fail, and that is to strike at 
least one blow before I die for the faith 
that has made me. By that faith, and 
that faith alone, I have come to see the 
purpose of human life; and please God, 
I will not quit this world until I have 
testified to the. fact. I feel that I am 
standing before you to-night as a witness 
summoned to testify to the faithfulness 
of God, a conviction which leads inevi- 
tably, I think, to the sense of immortality. 

“Tmmortality”’ is the subject of this 
lecture, but I cannot believe that those 
who established it were unmindful of 
the fact that immortality cannot be 


4 THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 


considered apart from faith in God. As 
Emerson says, ‘‘The moment the doc- 
trine of immortality is separately taught, 
man has already fallen.”! Indeed, he 
might have gone farther and said that 
immortality cannot be separately taught, 
or even conceived. For such, I think, is 
the truth. You may divide the waters 
of the universe, but they close behind 
your hand. I find no passage in the New 
Testament in which Jesus separates im- 
mortality from God. He proclaimed 
that all men were sons of God, and there- 
fore immortal. That the conceptions are 
inseparable is the very heart of his teach- 
ing; if you reject it, you must reject the 
whole. Cut the branch from the stem 
and it dies. Cut off immortality from 
the God-head and it is dead, also. 

But even if it were possible, [ could not 
attempt the task for I should be en- 
tangled at once in a maze of definition 


1‘’The Over Soul’’: Essays, First Series, page 266. 


THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 5 


and argument in which I should be lost. 
My fear of definitions may be merely a 
cowardly prudence; for I confess that, 
when I am forced to handle them, I feel 
like an amateur snake-charmer exhibiting 
cobras. I fear their bite. But I am con- 
scious of a better excuse, for even in 
skilful hands definitions may kill the sub- 
ject they define. A dead faith is not of 
much service to you, and, therefore, it is 
clear to me that he who would defend his 
faith in immortality must avoid killing 
it at the outset by chopping off its head. 

It is my firm belief that this life and 
the next are all of a piece. I see nothing 
in the law of God, as it works in this 
world, which warrants the assumption 
that death will make a clean breach with 
life. The future life will start where this 
one stops or nowhere; the man who 
serves God to-day will not be out of a 
job to-morrow; nor perhaps he who 
serves the Devil either. 


6 THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 


I speak to you of faith in God as I 
have found it by experience; and one of 
the most remarkable points in that ex- 
perience is that I have been able to 
verify in my own case the fact so often 
illustrated in the Bible, that faith begins 
in the heart and not in the head; in other 
words, men develop feelings into ideas 
and not ideas into feelings. Certainly in 
my case faith began in the region of the 
emotions as a -non-rational thing, and 
proceeded thence to my head to get itself 
rationalized. The effort to graft faith 
onto the stem of logic failed, for the sap 
would not run,: But when I reversed the 
process and grafted reason on faith, the 
result was. better. } 
' Reason and logic are the keys to the 
doors of knowledge, but not of wisdom; 
in my case they would not open the door 
to faith. It must be opened from within, — 
and there seems to be a time-lock on it 
set by the hand of God. You cannot 


THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 7 


crack Heaven like a bank vault; the 
jimmy of the psychic has failed to spring 
the door; and I, therefore, frankly aban- 
don all attempts to prove a thesis. This 
is not the plaintiff’s brief but his confes- 
sion of faith. No blow with a knock- 
down argument is aimed at the head of 
any man. It is his heart that I aim for; 
the region of emotion and instinct where 
the spring of action lies hidden. 

I am profoundly impressed with the 
power of faith (or instinct based upon 
feeling more than on reason) to influence 
men’s. action, not only in the field of 
religion, but in the affairs of this world 
as well. For I observe that it has great 
power with the men wisest in worldly 
matters. Your successful salesman, for 
example, owes his success to the faith of 
his customers in Aim rather than in his 
arguments or his statistics. In business, 
construction, or finance those with imag- 
ination directed by instinct—feeling— 


8 THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 


faith—achieve success, while men who 
in learning and intellect tower above 
them quite often fail. Logic applied to 
many problems of the merchant fails to 
solve them, for logical reasoning is often 
faced with a mass of evidence which will 
break the grip of the most powerful 
mind, leaving the man doubtful and 
unable to act. The great merchant 
achieves by instinct a sort of rhythmic 
tuning to the movement of the markets, 
which is the secret of his power. The 
sureness of his foresight is quite marvel- 
lous, arising apparently from a synthetic 
harmony of the whole creature in which 
not the brain or reasoning faculty alone, 
but the whole structure of the man, 
works together in leading him to his de- 
cision. All acts of extraordinary right- 
ness or heroism seem to have behind 
them an ultra-rational sanction to which 
men bow. 

As a concrete example of the power of 


THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 9 


instinctive men, take the British mer- 
chant marine. The officers of her ships, 
who give the institution its heroic char- 
acter, are not men of rare intelligence or 
great learning. They are men of sense and 
method, but also of instinct and of faith. 
They do not reason about their duty; 
they know it; the act comes straight from 
the shoulder, like a blow. It is so of all 
great leaders both on land and sea. 

But here I must try to steer you clear 
of a confusion into which I myself fell. 
I want to plead for courageous faith and 
not blind fanaticism. The men I speak 
of do not act on faith when they can have 
fact. There is a world of fact where it is 
folly to go by guess-work. The ship cap- 
tain does not guess at his reckoning, he 
“takes the sun’’; the engineer does not 
guess at the strength of a girder, he 
works it out; the banker does not guess 
at the market value of his security, he 
looks it up. 


10 THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 


Never guess when you can know, but 
when you cannot, have the courage to 
follow your instinct and leap. © 

These considerations give me confi- 
dence in my instinctive faith. There is 
a veil drawn between us and our highest 
aspiration—which is to see the face of 
God. We must leap through it with 
faith, Just as men in the work-a-day 
world leap to their highest material 
achievements. 

And if this be the sound method, 
when I desire to arouse an active faith in 
another man, I must follow the example 
of the prize fighter who aims his most 
telling blow at what he calls the solar 
plexus, alleged to be located behind the 
stomach. While the doctors tell me there | 
is no such organ, I feel as if there were. 
Compelling conviction feels like a radi- 
ation from the middle of a man, flooding 
him with heat which makes him act; 
such action is in part instinctive, and I 


THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 11 


find that men of the keenest and most 
reliable judgment habitually act so. 
They know how to act, but not always 
why; while your strictly rational person 
(the pure thinking machine) is an unsafe 
business guide. 

I conclude, therefore, that to move a 
man to action you must hit for his solar 
plexus (even though there is none), and 
further, that you should beware how 
you use as a weapon the argument that 
the act is safe. Probably you will not 
convince him; but if you do, you will de- 
prive him of the zest which gives him 
his power. For he has learned by experi- 
ence that he who seeks a profit must take 
a reasonable (though not a crazy) risk: 
you cannot get something for nothing. 
Man does not shun all risk, for he is 
impregnated with a sporting instinct. 
From his first beginnings he has lived 
surrounded by danger; those who have 
survived are those who have had the 


12 THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 


skill and the intelligence to overcome it; 
the struggle has bred the joy of battle 
into their very bones, so that the ele- 
ment of risk is essential to their happi- 
ness. 

It is only those who have been in mis- 
chief—the Devil’s disciples—who fear 
to die. The servants of God, it seems, 
will risk their lives against a straw. Asa 
child, I gulped down with the rest the 
familiar quotation from the Book of Job: 
‘A skin for a skin, all that a man hath 
will he give for his life’; and it was only 
at a recent date that, finding it untrue 
to life, I examined it more closely, and 
discovered that the remark is attributed 
to Satan, the father of lies. 

And so I repeat, good men will not | 
run from danger, and he who would lead 
them into action must hit for the solar 
plexus with a sporting proposition. 
Oberman shows the right spirit when he 
throws down the gauntlet to the AIl- 


THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 13 


mighty exclaiming, “And if it be true 
that annihilation awaits us, let us so live 
that it shall be an unjust fate.” Of all 
sporting propositions the greatest ever 
devised is the Christianity of Jesus, 
which for that very reason has proved 
“unto Jews a stumbling-block and unto 
Gentiles foolishness.”’ It is the only 
faith that will put adequate power be- 
hind your blow. 

For the assertion that the sporting 
instinct is inherent in Christianity you 
need not take my word, for the great 
Dr. L. P. Jacks has proved it up to the 
hilt. 

The hunter is the oldest of craftsmen, 
his life depends upon his skill, and, 
therefore, the hunter for the souls of 
men may do well to follow the practice 
of other hunters and keep to leeward of 
his quarry. Certainly the smell of some 
noted evangelists was an offence to the 
nostrils of many they sought to save. 


14 THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 


But this is not a still hunt. It is the coun- 
sel of the hunters, so that I do wisely to 
indicate to you my angle of approach; 
and in order that we may all act in 
harmony, it is necessary that I should 
give you some description of the group- 
ings or sub-divisions of those whose 
souls I search for. I find three main di- 
visions: first, those who believe in God 
the Father Immortal, and in His im- 
mortal children; second, those who be- 
‘lieve in God and in the law of obedience 
to His will (that is, in conscience), but are 
doubtful of their immortality; and third, 
those who know that they have a con- 
science because it occasionally hurts 
them, but who do not know God. Pro- 
ceeding to consider them separately, I 
begin with the assertion, which you may 
think over-bold, that although many in 
the first, and all in the second group ap- 
pear to be uninterested in discussions of 
immortality, it is not because they dis- 


THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 15 


believe it, but because they believe it so 
firmly. Nothing bores a man like telling 
him what he knew before. 

Taking those in the first group, who 
consciously believe in immortality, and 
asking myself what it is that they know 
and what it is that they want to know 
in regard to it, I find that they believe 
implicitly in the great fact of immortal- 
ity, but do not want exact information 
as to details. Such certainty would be 
not only useless but fatal to their happi- 
ness. In a world the uncertainties of 
which almost drive us mad, that may 
sound like a foolish statement; for we 
know that the stockbroker would barter 
his very soul for a sure tip on to-morrow’s 
market, or the cotton-spinner on the 
price of July cotton. But it is essential 
to note that what these men demand is a 
tip given to them but withheld from 
others. To know with certainty what 
will happen to-morrow, if all other men 


16 THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 


knew it also, would be not only worth- 
less but ruinous. It would be intolerable 
if man could foresee all the events of his 
life, and of the lives of others. Free will 
would be destroyed; the road would 
stretch away straight and dusty to the 
grave; and if this knowledge were en- 
larged, so that man could know not only 
what would happen in this world, but 
what would happen for all eternity (if, 
in short, he were given absolute cer- 
tainty about the exact nature of immor- 
tality), such knowledge would be a night- 
mare fit to drive him into screaming 
madness. I repeat, therefore, that the 
fact of immortality is central to the faith 
of those in my first group, but nothing 
more. 

Of those in my second group, this is 
not true. Some of the noblest men and 
women whom I have known tell me that © 
they doubt the immortality of the soul, 
and do not care much about it anyway. 


THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 17 


Their attitude is well described by Emer- 
son’s remark that with the question “‘of 
immortality the soul when well employed - 
is incurious.”! ‘The soul when well 
employed,’ mark that well, for other- 
wise you will fall, as I did some thirty 
years ago, into the pit you have digged. 

The men and women of this group who 
doubt immortality are always well em- 
ployed. Among them you find the scien- 
tist striving to enlarge the sum of human 
knowledge; the doctor laboring to save 
the lives of men; the social worker sacri- 
ficing his body to save the soul of an- 
other; the great industrialist and the 
banker battering down obstructions in 
the material world. These men work 
from a high sense of duty to the race, and 
find all the immortality they crave in the 
belief that good works survive; their 
motive is obedience, well described by 
Lowell, — 


1 vol. vi, p. 227.— Riverside Edition. 


18 THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 


Three roots bear up Dominion: Knowledge, 
Will, — 
These twain are strong, but stronger yet the 
thirdyac . | 
Obedience — ’t is the great tap-root that still, 
Knit round the rock of Duty, is not stirred, 
Though Heaven-loosed tempests spend their 
utmost skill. | 


Duty—conscience—obedience to the 
law of God, these are their motives. If 
I ask them how they come by the power 
which produces their splendid work, 
when they believe that all consciousness 
will soon vanish utterly, they answer: 
“We work to benefit the race, for the 
generations to come; that is our immor- 
tality. There is a moral law which we 
obey and which so commands us.”” This 
humble little sense of duty! There is 
something supernatural and uncanny in 
the power of it which can drive the as- 
tronomer faster than the speed of light, 
make the physicist more agile than the 
molecule, and enable the engineer to 


THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 19 


catch Nature by the hair and: harness 
her to his car. If it be not divine, it is 
at least superhuman. These men and 
women have faith in God and the in- 
stinct of obedience to His laws. Does 
their faith differ essentially from mine? 
No one can see these people at work and 
doubt that they ave immortal—no one, 
that is, except themselves. But I find it 
baffling that these immortals should 
doubt their immortality. They are too 
modest and too well employed to care. 
“Tf annihilation awaits us, at least we 
will so live that it shall be undeserved.”’ 
Is it a mere question of terms? Is what 
I call immortality, and they call con- 
science, one and the same? Such an idea 
may seem to you preposterous, but I 
have come to believe it true. My wor- 
ship of God and belief that I am His son 
produce in me obedience; the sceptical 
scientist’s sense of duty also produces 
obedience; “By their fruits ye shall 


20 THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 


know them’’; man’s faith is proved by 
what he does and not by his definition 
of it. } | 

I am not a rational animal, but I be- 
lieve in a rational world; and unless it be 
mere bedlam, the same effect must al- 
ways follow the same cause; and so, when 
I see a violent atheist risk his life to save 
a dog, while the deacon climbs for the 
cyclone cellar, I would barter the whole 
holy family of the deacon for the God of 
the atheist, and claim a bargain to boot. 
Of the two, the atheist has the stronger 
faith. He may deny God and immortal- 
ity, but his worship of No-God has tuned 
him in harmony with the universal law 
which I call the law of God. Your good 
atheist’s atheism is in his head-piece, 
where it does no harm. His heart is 
right. “The wicked sayeth in his heart 
there is no God”’; but not this man. 

Those in the first group believe them- 
selves to be sons of God and immortal 


THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 21 


because their God is immortal; those in 
the second group believe in God and 
recognize the command of conscience, 
which, as I see it, is the instinct to har- 
monize the act of the individual with the 
law of God. Such an instinct can arise 
only from the fact that man’s soul is es- 
sentially akin to God (that is, a part of 
God, or, as I call it, a son of God), so 
that I have come to believe that this 
thing called “sense of duty to others and 
solicitude for the welfare of future gen- 
erations,” which animates those in my 
second group, is the same instinct which 
I call immortality; and I hope that I 
shall not offend them by suggesting that 
they seem to me to have the sense of im- 
mortality without an intellectual belief 
in it. That is enough for me, and I note 
in passing that this sense gives to their 
lives the harmony which I observed in 
the successful merchant. This is how he 
came by it. If a theologian should ask 


22 THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 


me whether man can have faith in im- 
mortality without knowing it, I reply by 
reminding him that in all such men I 
postulate explicit faith in God. Given 
this, I think the sense of immortality is 
often most useful when subconscious. 
For faith is a spiritual condition and not 
a creed or a form of words; it needs no 
copyright to legalize and protect it. 
There are some, however, who would 
claim membership in the second group 
because they recognize a sense of duty, 
whom I must exclude. These are the 
selfish men, who talk about their duty 
to others but think about themselves, 
and those pitiable persons who suffer 
from the disease sometimes called the 
New England conscience, although it has 
no geographical limit. I exclude them 
because the instinct of duty, in order to 
be a safe guide, must be founded upon a — 
belief in God sufficiently controlling to 
convert the man. Without that it will 


THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 23 


not produce the harmony essential to a 
useful life; conversion is necessary to 
that harmony. 

At the risk of seeming to labor the 
point, I want to suggest two states of 
mind which are not uncommon, and 
which are often called faith, but mis- 
takenly, as I think, because they do not 
convert the man. One is the profession 
of belief in God by those who think it a 
good gambling chance; they are really 
worshippers of Mammon, who would like 
to stand well with both sides. If I read 
his letters aright, the Hon. Cecil Rhodes 
was one of these. 

And then there are those whose faith 
in God is what I call a creed: a man-made 
thing of high importance, but not one to 
be blindly worshipped. For it is a faith 
in men rather than a faith in God; sur- 
render of the mind and will to a creed 
does not produce conversion which frees 
the worshipper from fear. 


24 THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 


Let me suggest to you this analogy. 
The soul of man is like a fountain in the 
Garden of Eden, supplied with the living 
water which is the will of God, and pour- 
ing it out over the garden of life as serv- 
ice to mankind. In: the healthy soul 
both inlet and overflow are always open; 
what God supplies to the man he passes 
on to the world, and the happiest man, 
like the clearest spring, is he who over- 
flows most abundantly. Such is the soul 
referred to by Emerson, and such is its 
good employment. But sin will stop the 
inlet; selfishness in refusing to pass on 
God’s gift will cut off the supply, and the 
water in the basin will stagnate and go 
rotten. Or aman may block the inlet by 
losing his faith in God and go on giving 
out by blind instinct until the basin be 
drained to the dregs. Such is the man . 
with the “ingrowing” conscience, the 
acid lees of an ancient sense of duty 
which, drained of faith, has turned from 


THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 25 


an inspiration into an insanity and eaten 
out the soul of the sufferer. All men who 
believe in God and strive to live in har- 
mony with His will are fountains of liv- 
ing water, whether they have arrived at 
the knowledge of God through the crav- 
ing for immortality, or whether they 
have found God as “The Whole,” of 
which the instinct of duty in them is a 
conscious and obedient part. These last 
have faith in God; they are obedient to 
His will and they leave the future in His 
hands. That is the pinnacle of faith, be- 
yond which no man can climb; and this 
is why I feel that the members of my 
second group are perhaps the best men 
and women in our contemporary world. 
Those who practise this way of life are 
true sons of God; as such, they are im- 
mortal if God is immortal; and so, I say 
again, the faith of these men and women 
and my faith in immortality are part and 
parcel of the same thing. 


26 THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 


I can find no vital distinction between 
these two groups of men; the difference 
is superficial and may perhaps arise from 
the road which they have travelled to 
reach their faith. Like men coming upon 
a shield from opposite directions, they 
describe it differently because they see 
opposite sides. Those in whose faith the 
concept of immortality is central may be 
those in whom an intense life-force has 
bred a craving for survival, which they 
were powerless to appease until they had 
found an Immortal Father; while those 
in whom the sense of moral obligation is 
central have come to know God through 
finding themselves unable to unify and 
harmonize their lives without conscious 
submission to His will. 

I maintain that there are at least two 
roads that lead to God, in spite of the | 
assertion of Baron von Hiigel that all 
religious souls come first to God and then 
to immortality. For I find a Spanish 


THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 27 


scholar, also a good Catholic, who asserts 
the exact opposite. Both are sturdy 
champions. A man might back either 
and find himself a winner; but I think 
they will run a dead heat, for the truth, 
as I see it, is that faith in God comes in 
answer to a hunger for Him which is 
sometimes the result of the life-force 
seeking survival, and sometimes of the 
craving for guidance in the path of duty. 

This only is essential. All who have 
faith in God have surrendered their will 
to His. By so doing they have been born 
again of the spirit and will enter the 
Kingdom of Heaven. All are in fact 
twice-born men, and before I close I 
shall take up this point again. 

If I have been able to carry you with 
me so far, you will readily agree that the 
evangelist will only waste his breath in 
urging upon them the doctrine of immor- 
tality as an isolated dogma. To him they 
will not listen, but only to those who 


28 THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 


preach the power of faith. The instinct 
and the lives of these men and women 
confirm the fact which I have tried 
throughout to emphasize, namely, that 
the sense of immortality comes with 
faith in God and is inseparable from it. 
You have both or neither. 

I come now to the third group — those 
who have a conscience but no faith in 
God. Many of them have an intellec- 
tual belief in the idea of God; but it is an 
idea—a dead thing—and not a living 
faith. God will not accept half-hearted 
faith, You must offer Him complete 
surrender and conversion. _ 

For those in this group I speak “as 
one having authority,” for I was a char- | 
ter member of it and for many years an 
active one, and, therefore, the most use- 
ful thing for me to do is to report the 
manner of my escape. I had no living 
faith. Men have accused me of having 
a New England conscience, but I think 


THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 29 


they flattered me. A blind life-force was 
my real motive. In so far as education 
and early environment can promote 
spiritual health, I was singularly favored; 
nothing could have been finer than the 
atmosphere of refinement, scholarship, 
and social service with which I was sur- 
rounded. I heard little discussion of dog- 
matic theology: faith in God was im- 
plicit rather than spoken; but my whole 
early life was illuminated by the rarest 
spirit of service and sense of duty in the 
whole family circle. Before I went to 
college Phillips Brooks had reached his 
prime; I heard him often and with in- 
terest, but as the event proved, without 
lasting effect, as is too often true of 
preaching unsupported by personal con- 
tact. Through the years of adolescence 
and early manhood my soul was sub- 
merged by the body and the material 
world, as if the body had rolled over, so 
to speak, upon the soul and crushed it. 


30 THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 


I was little more than a healthy animal, 
driven by the life-force, loving activity 
and adventure, and almost unconscious 
of the existence of a soul. The instinct 
of adventure, which was strong, brought 
me into contact with the hunters of the 
north, who, in conjunction with the 
forces of nature, were my best teachers; 
and I recall the significant fact that I 
had an active and romantic imagination 
which I now believe might have been 
turned into more useful channels by a 
skilful “engineer of souls.” 

Going into business immediately after 
college, I had found a footing at thirty 
and was a fair success, as measured by 
earning capacity. The life-force which — 
had been strong enough to overlay the | 
spirit drove me at a pressure too high to 
be healthy; but life was exciting and I 
must have been over thirty-five before 
serious misgivings assailed me. About 
that time the excitement began to pall; 


THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 31 


success did not beget happiness, and 
there was little joy in life. I had not 
achieved harmony with my world. I 
was disturbed by the suspicion that I 
was not making an adequate return to 
society for what it paid me, and I now 
see that the eternal law of compensation 
described by the prophetic Emerson was 
at work. My efforts to “slice off the up- 
per surface of life so thin as to leave it 
bottomless”? had failed, and the Law of 
this world was demanding payment. 

It is the law that in the material world 
every gain is balanced by an equal loss, 
but not in the spiritual world. ‘The 
soul is not a compensation but a life. 
There is no penalty to virtue; no penalty 
to wisdom.” Hence man moves up- 
ward. There is here an increment of pure 
profit without loss. 

But the meat and drink on which I 
‘had fed my soul were not the bread of 
life and the living water; I was anhun- 


32 THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 


gered and athirst, although barely con- 
scious of it. At forty-two I was attacked 
by a dangerous disease, which gradually 
reduced my physical power, until after 
eight years the weakened body seemed 
to release the soul. Would that I had 
sooner learned the beneficent power of 
fasting and prayer! When first faced 
with the prospect of death and lacking 
the solace of prayer, I knew the meaning 
of fear. An unhealthy soul had been iil 
employed, and being unprepared to leap 
into the unknown, I feared it. For many 
years a subconscious instinct unlighted 
by faith had been my only guide, but 
there came a day when it broke through 
into consciousness. Conviction of my 
own weakness, craving for help and will- 
ingness to obey fused into a desire so 
dominating that it warranted an answer. - 
Groping unskilfully in the spiritual 
world, I found at last relief in prayer: 
the expression of my yearning for im- 


THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 33 


mortality and for communion with God. 
My prayer was answered and I was 
born again, almost exactly at the age of 
fifty. 

The released spirit found a faith that 
it was a part of God; that if God was 
immortal, it was immortal too. This 
brought me new life and for the first 
time peace. Perhaps my experience is 
not altogether normal, but it may be 
that the steps in the process will be the 
same for other men, and that, if I can 
analyze what happened in my case and 
find the underlying principle which 
would have helped me, it may serve some 
other man. But such an undertaking is 
valueless unless Jesus spoke literal truth 
when he said, ‘‘ Ye must be born again if 
ye would enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” 
I believe he did. Conversion is necessary 
to salvation. Conversion saved me from 
the jangling discord of a will torn be- 
tween body and soul, polarized my life, 


34 THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 


and taught me where to look for guid- 
ance. : | | 
The points which now seem to me sig- 
nificant in the process are: that owing to 
the reaction against dogmatic theology, 
which was strong at that time, the syste- 
matic practice of worship formed no part 
of my early education; that at college I 
received no religious training or inspira- 
tion; that the greatest preaching of the 
period did not produce any permanent 
effect; that my native tendency to indi- 
-vidualism, materialism, and intellectual 
scepticism was emphasized instead of be- 
ing counteracted by my college course; 
and that I was given too early a freedom 
which I was incompetent to use. As a 
result of native weakness and the lack 
of a religious motive, my life has been 
largely wasted. But the essential fact 
for me to-day is that I was born again, 
and I have faith to believe that all men 
are capable of conversion. If this is not 


THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 35 


true, the house of my faith is built upon 
the sands. 

Conversion is the acid test by which 
faith is proved. If a man’s faith be a 
true faith, it will appear in his life; it will 
convert him and synchronize his acts 
with the laws of the universe, so that he 
will display poise and power. This is no 
question of creeds, or philosophical prin- 
ciples. It is not a fabric of words, but of 
acts. A man may deny immortality or 
even God, but if his way of life shows 
that he has subordinated his will to the 
laws of God, he is a twice-born man and 
Son of God. 

I cannot believe that conversion is a 
rare, miraculous, or revolutionary proc- 
ess. Such eminent authorities as Harold 
Begbie and William James refer to it as 
a spiritual revolution, and cite many ex- 
amples of conversions of the explosive 
type in men of middle age which tore the 
man like an earthquake. It is quite clear 


36 THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 


that the crust on them was hard. But 
unless by the word revolution you mean 
simply a turning around, it does not, I 
think, accurately describe what takes 
place in most cases. For conversion is 
an evolution and not a revolution or 
catastrophe, even in the most explosive 
cases. In these it is the result of a grad- 
ual change of valuation of the spiritual 
and material goods of a man, as a result 
of which he finally admits bankruptcy 
and throws himself on the mercy of his 
creditor—God. Like the failure of a 
great merchant, it may come with a 
crash, but it was long in preparation. 
Many of you can remember the “ Baring 
panic” produced by the failure of one of 
the oldest and greatest banking houses 
in the world. One day all was serene: the 
next morning, when you looked at your > 
newspaper, the financial world was in 
ruins. The event was sudden, but it was 
no accident. It was the result of unsound 


THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 37 


methods of business which had been go- 
ing on for years. Conversion is like that. 
The merchant throws himself on the 
mercy of his creditors and often gets 
small mercy. But the spiritual bankrupt 
or convert, throwing himself on the 
mercy of God, always obtains mercy — 
but on one condition: his repentance 
must be sincere; he must make a clean 
breast of it. His schedule of assets and 
liabilities must be honest and complete. 
If it is, he will find God’s mercy infinite. 
This is the story of all the sudden or ex- 
plosive converts. They find that by sur- 
render to God they have an infinite 
credit on which to draw. 

As I have said, these sudden conver- 
sions are the result, I think, of a slow 
process of spiritual evolution. All men 
must be born again, but not all must go 
through bankruptcy. As in the case of 
the merchants, many foresee the prog- 
ress of changing values and adapt them- 


38 THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 


selves to it in time to avoid bankruptcy. 
But all men and all merchants must har- 
monize themselves with the law, or be 
annihilated. 

Conversion is, I repeat, the result of a 
slowly born conviction which forces the 
man at last to throw up his hands, aban- 
don anarchy, and fall into step with the 
rest of the Universe. It is a process 
closely akin to many of the evolutionary 
changes which occur in un-self-conscious 
animals and plants. Those that obey 
survive. That is Nature’s law. Shall the 
soul of man alone be exempt? The com- 
mand of the prophet, “Believe in God 
[that is, obey His law] or go to Hell,” 
may seem harsh to you, but it is milder 
than the command of Nature, “Obey my 
law or be annihilated.” 

One might argue from the obvious | 
unity of the universe that the disobedi- 
ent man, like the disobedient plant, 
would be annihilated and that, therefore, 


THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 39 


man in the exercise of free-will can choose » 
between immortality and _ extinction. 
But I bid you remember the law of con- 
servation of energy. The animal or 
plant, or the body of a man, if disobedi- 
ent, may die; but energy and the soul are 
immortal. Doubtless his obedience to 
the will of God will affect man’s future 
life as it does his present, and we may 
accept as true the teaching of Christ, 
“Not every one who saith unto me, 
Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kngdom 
of heaven; but he who doeth the will of 
my Father who is in heaven.” 

If conversion is a process of evolution, 
it should normally occur in such a quiet 
and natural way as almost to escape 
notice, which is exactly what I find. 
Take, for example, the changes you ob- 
serve between the wild young under- 
graduate and the same man a year or two 
later, in the schools of Law, Medicine, 
and Science, or in some men who marry 


40 THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 


young. One can think of innumerable 
cases where changes occurred which 
marked, I believe, a second birth. The 
assertion is beyond my power to prove, 
but I cling stubbornly to the belief that 
intimate acquaintance would show that 
all happy, effective, oriented men have 
passed through the fire and been born 
again. 

And, therefore, I make bold to assert 
that all men whose lives are dominated 
by faith in God have assimilated into 
their structure all that is essential in the 
doctrine of immortality, and that the 
forces engaged in the crusade for a re- 
vival of faith can all be massed against 
the enemy’s left wing, so to speak, in ~ 
which are brigaded those of feeble faith 
or of no self-conscious faith at all. But 
because in every one of them the spark 
of conscience is still alive, they can all be 
won over. There are none in whom it has 
gone out: the hand of man, moved by the ~ 


THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 41 


will of God, can fan it into a flame that 
will burn through the crust and break 
out of the subconscious. 

If you look at the lives of the most 
degraded, — those who of their own 
free-will have sunk almost to the level 
of brutes,—you will see a marvellous 
thing; for no matter how a man has lived 
or how low he has sunk, there is always a 
level to which he will not fall; there is al- 
ways some baseness to which he will not 
stoop; some act from which he will recoil 
with horror. He cannot live at so low a 
level as to destroy an instinct in him 
which has a restraining power. The 
spark of conscience is always alive, wait- 
ing to be fanned into flame. 

I believe that conversion often begins 
with the breaking into consciousness of 
the sense of duty—conscience becoming 
self-conscious; but when I ask myself 
whether it is always safe for the zealous 
disciple to try to hasten the process in 


42 THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 


his brother, I get the answer that it is 
not. Rare skill is needed, or damage will 
be done, and there is always danger. 
Self-consciousness of some kinds does 
great harm. It seems, for example, that 
the less we think about the operation of 
our bodies the better. Beware how you 
worry about going to sleep, or how you 
fool with that part of the nervous system 
by which your internal organs are con- 
trolled—that which directs the heart, 
lungs, and the miraculous internal chem- 
istry known as metabolism, by which 
you turn bread into blood and bone. 
Make yourself conscious, and thereby 
anxious, about these processes, and they 
go balky at once and produce the hypo- - 
chondriac or neurasthenic. Nothing is 
more certain, in this world of uncertainty, 
than that the man who bothers his head 
about these processes—that is, he who 
drags them by the tail from their holes 
in the subconscious—is unwise. They ~ 


THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 43 


resist such meddling fiercely, and when 
you get them out, they bite you. Here of 
a truth is a danger signal on the road to 
the subconscious which you had better 
not run past, for if you do, you wreck 
your train. 

Clearly some processes should remain 
automatic, but I think not all. Exact 
information on the subject must come 
from the experts, but may not a plain 
man venture to report the guesses which 
his experience suggests? It may help 
him to understand the report of the ex- 
perts when received. We are often self- 
conscious when we should be automatic, 
and vice versa. Is this the safe rule? 
Don’t meddle with those processes which 
are older than intellect and memory, but 
cultivate the younger ones. For in- 
stance, the nervous system, which con- 
trols the bodily functions, is common to 
man and beast and must, therefore, be 
older than the intellect. Man could eat 


44 THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 


long before he could think. The intellect 
is the child a thousand times removed of 
the nervous system, which therefore re- 
sents the baby’s curiosity; as who should 
say, ““I reached my full manhood a mil- 
lion years or so before you were born. 
Don’t teach your grandmother how to 
suck eggs.” 

But some of the emotions, including 
the religious instinct, seem to be the 
children of mind and memory, and doc- 
ile under their teaching. The sense of 
duty, for instance, can reach its full de- 
velopment only with their aid, for thus 
it grows into the love of God. Conver- 
sion, as I have said, is such a develop- 
ment or evolution. The intelligence . 
must be used, but used with skill. 

The method of some revivalists, so 
eager for results that they call emotional. 
hysteria to their aid, has been justly con- 
demned. In dragging the religious in- 
stinct out of limbo they bring with it 


THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 45 


other passions which often fall upon the 
tender thing and devour it. Skill and 
caution must be the tools, and they must 
be guided by the hand of faith. The man 
who thinks to take conversion out of 
the hand of God into his own is a pub- 
lic menace, for conversion must begin 
within the sinner’s soul; the seed planted 
by God’s hand must sprout from an inner 
heat. As I have said before, it cannot be 
grafted from the stem of logic. The 
man’s conscience must knock before the 
door is opened. Like the chicken in the 
egg, it must break the shell before old- 
hen intellect can pluck it out and teach 
it to live. 

If there be a keeper of hens who has 
strayed so far from his habitat as to be 
within hearing, he will want to remind 
me that, in the process of hatching eggs, 
hens have now given place to incubators, 
and that my illustration is mouldy. I 
thank him for the thought, but I reply 


46 THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 


that, though many machines have been 
invented for the purpose of hatching 
souls, none have succeeded. Man can help 
the chick to grow; he cannot hatch it. 
But the new-born chick has not many 
feathers—food and shelter must be pro- 
vided in order that the craving for God 
born in weakness may grow into love and 
knowledge of Him and conversion be 
permanent and complete. This is where 
religious education comes in. A full- 
grown faith can protect itself, for it has 
reached an elevation at which the germ 
diseases of childhood cannot live. But 
when it is young, the loving hand of man 
can be its doctor. It will be attacked by 
the germ of intellectual scepticism, and 
I bid you beware how you send the in- 
fant soul to spend a week-end with 
Science in the house of Logic. It may — 
come home with a cold in its heart. 
Material reverses, disease, and the loss 
of friends will often blight the budding 


THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 47 


spirit; apply the stimulant of conse- 
crated personality, the food of historic 
faith and the warmth of common worship. 

These are the remedies which have 
worked for me; and when hours of dark- 
ness come, I find deep comfort in review- 
ing the events in my own life, to many of 
which I can give no coherent meaning 
without belief in God. 

The doctors of the soul who are li- 
censed to administer these remedies are 
the ministers, and one thinks that there 
was never a time when these men had 
such an opportunity and such power. 
The profession of the ministry, ever a 
pursuit of honor, is to-day the most use- 
ful career upon which a man can embark. 
But all men armed with humility and 
faith may be laborers in this field, for to 
bring men into conscious harmony with 
the will of God is the heart and soul of 
education. All men may help by precept 
or by the example of their lives — for 


48 THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 


the evidence of a man’s life is the greatest 
of all educational forces. The mighty 
tree of faith springs from one of two 
roots—the craving for immortal life, or 
a controlling sense of duty; both are of 
adequate power, for both lead toward 
harmony with the will of God and unify 
an otherwise divided and futile life. Im- 
mortality and faith are one. Many have 
it; all can have it. Of the three groups 
with which I opened two have merged 
into one, and the third will lose a mem- 
ber with every man who is born again. 
And now, to draw together the strands 
of my address and knot them, so to 
speak, I remind you of my formula: 
“Hit for the solar plexus with a sporting | 
proposition’; or, in terms of religious 
teaching: take the religion of Christ as 
your weapon and strike for the hearts of 
men. Thus will the faith of those who 
believe be strengthened, and those whom 


THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 49 


the hand of God has prepared for con- 
version will thus be protected and fed. 

Many of you who hear my words are 
ministers consecrated to preach the word 
of God, and every man and woman in 
this place is bound, as with a first duty, 
to proclaim the faith that is in him. 
Paul wrote to the Corinthians: “‘ Ye are 
not your own but ye were bought with 
a price.” That means you and me. We 
were bought with a price and we must 
pay it. 

Every day is doom’s day; we are as 
ever at the cross roads. To-day the sign 
boards read: 


= To FatIru. = To FAILurRe. 


You must choose between them at peril 
of your soul, but the choice is simple. 
We stand upon the threshold of a 
religious revival, like runners set upon 
the mark. The starter has raised his 
pistol and may discharge it before you 


50 THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY 


leave your seats. It is an opportunity 
and a duty such as no man now living 
ever saw, and I beseech you, when you 
set to your work of preaching the Gospel, 
preach the Gospel according to Christ, not 
according to Moses or Loyola, Luther, or 
Laké. Preach the simple faith of Christ, 
which will never leave you without an 
answer when men ask about the Immor- 
tality of the Soul. 





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